I woke up, pulse racing, Zula’s revelation buzzing in my ears, eyes, heart, my everything. Acknowledging our spirit creatures was all very well but displaying them could be lethal.
For an instant my senses grappled with what I’d experienced that night. Before I could take stock and delve deeper, I sniffed, suspicious of a change in the atmosphere. The hair in my ears bristled, identifying a strange jarring vibration. I sniffed again and as my nostrils inhaled the cloying scent of incense, my heart hammered faster than a starving man pounding fufu. Boom! Boom! The mother of all dangers was upon me! A menace I was familiar with had entered Gran-pa’s house!
Anyone watching would think as I sprang off my sleeping mat that the mat and my cover cloth were on fire. Yet there was no smoke to be seen and no fire to speak of. What convinced me was the smell wafting through the house.
It seeped beneath the doors: the door to the corridor and the one that opened into my grandparents’ bedroom. It meant one thing alone. My mother was home. Whenever she returned to visit us, Sweet Mother, as she insisted I call her, burned incense to rid the house of spirits: evil spirits.
I tied my sleeping cloth around me and ran into the courtyard. I ran to embrace the only creature I knew, apart from Gran-pa, who understood what it was like to be separated from a mother at a tender age. Standing at the bottom of a wizened, old neem tree, I yelled: ‘Milo! Milo! Are you there?’
Milo showed his face and then hid behind one of the tree’s towering boughs. He didn’t enjoy my mother’s visits any more than I did.
‘Come down, Milo,’ I pleaded.
He peeped out again and with a glum expression on his face, shook his head.
‘Coward! You want me to face her alone?’
Gnashing his teeth, Milo produced the screeching noises he makes when he’s scared and wants to terrify those who would prey on him. He had every reason to be wary of my mother. On a previous visit, she’d dared Gran-ma to cook her favourite bush stew, insinuating that what she hankered for most in the world was monkey meat. To make matters worse, to rub pepper in the wound of Milo’s hurt pride and my open-mouthed horror, she found the incident so entertaining she couldn’t stop laughing at us for days.
‘OK,’ I said to Milo. ‘Stay up there if you have to, but the least you can do is come down and greet me.’
As stubborn as a child who’s never had to fill his belly with water to help him sleep, but has been raised to eat jolloff rice his whole life, Milo hissed at me and shook his head.
‘Let’s hope her visit isn’t long, otherwise…’
‘I take it you’re talking about your mother.’ Gran-pa, already dressed for the day, placed a hand on my shoulder. I turned to face him and, linking his fingers in mine, smiled.
His hands were gnarled and rough – the hands of a man who works on the land nurturing seedlings and plants, a man who cultivates food to eat: yam, cassava, plantain and bananas. My grandparents and I grew most of the food we ate and yet Gran-pa still made time to see clients who came to him for healing and advice.
I nodded. Yes, I had been talking to Milo about my mother. ‘Why’s she come to visit us this time?’
‘Your grandmother wants her to talk sense into me.’
‘Gran-ma’s worried,’ I said. ‘And so am I, Gran-pa.’
‘Well you shouldn’t be. I haven’t believed – all these years – in what I do, what I’m about, to back down now.’
‘But Gran-pa…’ I wanted to let him know that I understood his resolute stand was about more than belief and principle. He was hurt, deeply hurt by the behaviour of our fellow citizens and their foreign partners. So was I.
I continued holding his hand until, unable to find words that said what I wanted to say, Gran-pa hushed my stuttering. He told me to hurry up and take my morning bath because on that day, a Saturday, he wanted me to accompany him on yet another of his visits to the chief’s palace.
‘I need you to be with me as a witness, Adoma,’ he said, ‘in case the unexpected happens.’
‘What do you mean by “unexpected”, Gran-pa?’
He wouldn’t say. He simply shook his head before stating that he planned to leave for the palace as soon as I’d welcomed my mother home and made breakfast for her.
*
I quickly fetched water and bathed. I pulled on a pair of jeans and t-shirt and, eager to jump the hurdle of my mother’s homecoming and land safely on the other side, I filled a pail with water from our well for my mother to use. It was then, and only then, that I knocked on the door of my grandparents’ bedroom.
No response.
I knocked a second time and detected movement on the other side.
I was about to knock again when the door swung open. Vapours of incense enveloped me as through a thick haze of grey, my mother emerged.
I’ve been told that I resemble her. She is almost as tall as Gran-pa. Athletic in build, she has a striking ebony face graced with almond-shaped eyes. Her hair, bundled in a hairnet, is long and jet-black, while mine, cropped short, has a dark reddish tinge to it.
‘Adoma, come in,’ she said smiling. ‘Let me pray for you, child.’
I remained at the doorway. ‘I’ve fetched water for your bath. I’m making your breakfast right now.’
She beckoned me closer: ‘Come,’ she insisted, offering her hand. ‘I’ve got a present for you.’
I took a step back. ‘Breakfast now, prayers later?’ I turned and ran down the corridor shouting: ‘Welcome home, Sweet Mother!’
Back in our outdoor kitchen, I stirred cornmeal dough and liquid in a bowl and then adding it bit by bit to a pan of boiling water, made porridge on a charcoal fire. I covered the pot to keep it warm, then cut and buttered two slices of bread in which I inserted a hastily fried egg. And all the time as I cooked and laid a breakfast tray for my mother, while I placed a large side table in front of Old Freedom and put a spoon on it, I allowed myself to hurl silent abuse at the woman I called Sweet Mother after her favourite hi-life song – a song she used to play again and again on Gran-pa’s radio cassette player.
I shook a broom in her face, cackling at the prospect that although I was not quite as tall as she was, I soon would be. And when the moment came and I was able to glare at her, eyeball to eyeball, I promised myself that I would tell her exactly what I thought of the prayers she bombarded me with; prayers she believed would save my soul even though I helped Gran-pa at our shrines – the one that used to be in the forest, the other at the back of our yard.
Simmering with rage, I allowed ancient memories to fan my frustration. For example: after she left me with my grandparents to forge a new life for herself, my mother married the leader of the Church of Spiritual Redemption, Pastor Elisha, and was admitted into his church and embraced it whole-heartedly.
With her new faith came problems I sensed long ago, when I was small as a chick scampering in Gran-pa’s yard. Time after time through insinuation and sneers, I noticed my mother’s contempt for what Nana Merrimore calls the Old Ways. Gran-pa, Sweet Mother declared, perhaps with Gran-ma at his side, was certain to writhe in the flames of hell for eternity.
Imagine someone telling you that as a child! And when that someone is your own mother… I bit my lip to taste the memory again. With it came a stab of irritation as I remembered what I’d done after she explained the difference between heaven and hell to me. I’d crawled beneath Old Freedom and, rolling in dust, wept tears of fury.
Sweet Mother? Once I started thinking about her, there was no end to it. It was like scratching a scab that never comes off, rubbing a sore that cannot heal.
I was still picking at it when I knocked again on my grandparents’ door. ‘Sweet Mother, your food is ready,’ I said.
‘Coming,’ she replied.
A few minutes later she strolled into the sitting room wearing a vibrant yellow bou-bou, a long, flowing robe that flattered her figure. On her hair was a matching head wrap that flapped up and down the way a frightened cockerel does when it’s determined to fly. By the time Sweet Mother had bustled over to Old Freedom and planted her behind on it, I was ready with a pot of hot water for her tea. She poured herself a cup and started eating.
Before she was halfway through the porridge, I was fidgeting, itching to be on the road with Gran-pa. I tried to exercise patience by counting to myself. When that didn’t work, I decided to place a bet. I bet you, Adoma, I told myself, before you reach thirty Sweet Mother will have told you off.
I began counting, but as I did so, I wriggled and twisting my fingers behind my back, rose up and down on my heels as if an ant had found its way into my pants.
Sweet Mother glanced in my direction and I savoured a gleam of disappointment in her black coral eyes: ‘Adoma, what is the matter with you?’
‘Gran-pa told me to hurry,’ I confessed. ‘He’s asked me to accompany him to the chief’s palace.’
‘Is he involving you in his nonsense as well? I forbid it!’
There it was – the first lash of disapproval and I hadn’t got up to twenty! I struggled not to smile.
‘You think I’m joking do you? Then think again! You are not going anywhere with your grandfather.’ My mother pushed her empty bowl of porridge to one side and took a savage bite of egg sandwich.
I waited until her mouth was full, waited until she was chomping heartily, before I raised the question I’d been asking my age-mates at school to rally support for our cause: mine and Gran-pa’s: ‘Don’t you care when trees are cut down in the forest and cyanide and mercury are used in a sacred river to mine gold? Don’t you care that most of the river’s fish are dead or not fit to eat? And that now it’s poisoned, no one upstream can use its water: not for drinking, washing or farming.’
Sweet Mother sighed. ‘Of course I care, Adoma!’
‘You don’t care enough. If you did you’d help Gran-pa and me do something about it.’
Sweet Mother shook her head. ‘This is Ghana, Adoma, and your grandfather is going about this business the wrong way…’
Before I could answer back, Gran-ma, behind me, interrupted: ‘And what would you say is the right way, daughter?’
‘Indeed,’ chuckled Gran-pa. ‘Tell me what I’m doing wrong and I’ll heed your advice. I may be old, but I’m willing to learn new tricks if it’ll help our cause.’
‘In that case, Pa, sit down and listen.’